The carriage drove on with its slight, rhythmic swaying. Sometimes, fighting against sleep, she heard his voice that seemed to come from far off, muffled in a cavernous echo. He went on citing articles of the Code to her, chiefly those having to do with everyday life. He talked to her about the rules of hospitality, in general referring to all the provisions concerning the guest within one’s gates, which, for an Albanian was sacred, quite beyond comparison with anything else. “Do you remember the definition of a house in the Kanun?” he said. “ ‘An Albanian’s house is the dwelling of God and the guest.’ Of God and the guest, you see. So before it is the house of its master, it is the house of one’s guest. The guest, in an Albanian’s life, represents the supreme ethical category, more important than blood relations. One may pardon the man who spills the blood of one’s father or of one’s son, but never the blood of a guest.”
He came back again and again to the laws of hospitality, but even in her drowsy state, she felt that his exposition of those ancient prescriptions, rolling on, grating away like the rusty teeth of a cogwheel, went from the peaceful side of daily life under the Code to the bloody side. No matter how one dealt with the Code, one always ended up there. And now, in a voice dressed in those resonances, he was recounting to her an incident that was typical of the world of the Kanun. She kept her eyes closed still, clinging to her half-sleep, for she sensed that only in that way would his voice come to her with those far-off echoes. That voice was telling her about a wayfarer travelling alone in the dark, at the foot of a steep mountain. Knowing that he was being hunted for blood vengeance, he had managed to keep safe from his avenger for a long time. Suddenly, on the highroad, with the night coming on, he was seized by a dark premonition. All around, there was nothing but the open heath, not a house, not a living soul from whom he could claim the protection due to a guest. He could see only a herd of goats that had been left to themselves by the herdsman. Then, so as to help pluck up his courage, or maybe so as not to die and disappear without a trace, he called out to the goatherd three times. No voice answered him. Then he called out to the buck with the big bell, “O buck with the big bell, if anything should happen to me, tell your master that before I reached the crest of the hill I was killed under your bessa.” And as if he had known what would happen, a few paces further on he was killed by the man who was lying in wait for him.
Diana opened her eyes.
“And then?” she asked, “what happened then?’
Bessian smiled a wry smile.
“Another goatherd who was not far off heard the stranger’s last words and told the man whose herd it was. And that man, even though he had never known the victim, had never seen him nor ever heard his name, left his family, his flock, and all his other concerns, to avenge the stranger who was connected with him under the bessa, and so plunged into the whirlwind of the blood feud.”
“That’s terrible,” Diana said. “But it’s absurd. There is fatality in it.”
“That’s true. It is at once terrible, absurd, and fatal, like all the really important things.”
“Like all the really important things,” she repeated, huddling back into her corner. She was cold. She looked abstractedly into the ragged pass between two mountains, as if she hopèd to find in that grey notch the answer to an enigma.
“Yes,” Bessian said, as if he had divined her unspoken question, “because to an Albanian a guest is a demi-god.”
Diana blinked, so that his words would not strike her so crudely. He lowered his tone, and his voice took on its echo as before, sooner than she would have expected.
“I remember having heard once, that, unlike many peoples among whom the mountains were reserved to the gods, our mountaineers, by the very fact that they lived in the mountains themselves, were constrained either to expel the gods or to adapt themselves to them so as to be able to live with them. Do you follow me, Diana? That explains why the world of the Rrafsh is half-real, half-imaginary, harking back to the Homeric ages. And it also explains the creation of demigods like the guest.”
He was silent for a moment, listening unawares to the sound of the wheels on the rocky road.
“A guest is really a demi-god,” he went on after a while, “and the fact that any one at all can suddenly become a guest does not diminish but rather accentuates his divine character. The fact that this divinity is acquired suddenly, in a single night simply by knocking at a door, makes it even more authentic. The moment a humble wayfarer, his pack on his shoulder, knocks at your door and gives himself up to you as your guest, he is instantly transformed into an extraordinary being, an inviolable sovereign, a law-maker, the light of the world. And the suddenness of the transformation is absolutely characteristic of the nature of the divine. Did not the gods of the ancient Greeks make their appearance suddenly and in the most unpredictable manner? That is just the way the guest appears at an Albanian’s door. Like all the gods he is an enigma, and he comes directly from the realms of destiny or fate—call it what you will. A knock at the door can bring about the survival or the extinction of whole generations. That is what the guest is to the Albanians of the mountains.”
“But that’s terrible,” she said.
He pretended not to have heard her and simply smiled, but with the cold smile of someone who intends to skirt what might well be the real subject of discussion.
“That is why an attack on a guest protected by the bessa is to an Albanian the worst possible misfortune, something like the end of the world.”
She looked out of the window and she thought that it would be hard to find a more suitable setting for a vision of the end of the world than these mountains.
“A few years ago, something took place in these parts that would astonish anyone but these mountain people,” said Bessian, and he put his hand on Diana’s shoulder. His hand had never felt so heavy to her. “Something really staggering.”
Why doesn’t he tell it to me? she wondered, after a silence long enough to seem unwonted. And she was really not in a state to know whether or not she cared to hear yet another disturbing story.
“A man was killed,” he said, “not from ambush, but right in the marketplace.”
Looking at him sidelong, Diana watched the corners of his lips. He told her that the killing had taken place in broad daylight, in the bustle of the marketplace, and the victim’s brothers had set out immediately in pursuit of the killer, for these were the first hours after the murder, when the truce had not yet been asked for, and the bloodshed could be avenged at once. The killer managed to elude his pursuers, but meanwhile the dead man’s whole clan was up in arms and was seeking him everywhere. Night was falling, and the murderer, who came from another village, did not know the country well. Fearing that he might be discovered, he knocked at the first door he found on his way, and asked that he be granted the bessa. The head of the household took the stranger in and agreed to his wish.
“And can you guess what house it was to which he had come for sanctuary?” said Bessian, with his mouth quite close to her neck.
Diana turned her head suddenly, her eyes wide and motionless.
“It was his victim’s house,” he said.
“I thought as much. And then? What happened then?”
Bessian took a deep breath. He told her that at first on either side no one suspected what had happened. The killer understood that the house to which he had come as a guest had been stricken with misfortune, but he never imagined that he himself had brought it about. The head of the house, on his part, in spite of his grief, welcomed the visitor in keeping with the custom, guessing that he had just killed someone and was being pursued, but not suspecting—he, too—that the murdered man was his own son.
And so they sat together by the hearth, eating and drinking coffee. As for the dead man, in keeping with the custom, he had been laid out in another room.
Diana started to say something, but she felt that the only words she could possibly utter were, “absurd” and “fateful”; she pr
eferred to be silent.
Bessian resumed, “Late in the evening, worn out by the long chase, the brothers of the murdered man came home. As soon as they came in they saw the guest sitting by the hearth, and they recognized him.”
Bessian turned his head towards his wife to gauge the effect of his words. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Nothing happened.”
“What?”
“Nothing at all. At first, in a fury, the brothers reached for their weapons, but a word from their father was enough to stop them and to calm them. I think you can imagine what it was that he said.”
Embarrassed, she shook her head.
“The old man simply said, ’He is a guest. Don’t touch him.’ ”
“And then? What happened then?”
“Then they sat down with their enemy and guest for as long as the custom required. They conversed with him, they prepared a bed for him, and in the morning they escorted him to the village boundary.”
Diana pressed two fingers between her eyebrows, as if she meant to extract something from her forehead.
“So that is their conception of a guest.”
Bessian brought out that sentence between two silences, as one sets an object in an empty space in order to throw it into relief. He waited for Diana to say “That’s terrible,” as she had the first time, or to say something else, but she said nothing. She kept her fingers on her forehead, where the brows meet, as if she could not find the thing that she wanted to tear away.
The muffled panting of the horses reached them from outside, and the coachman’s occasional whistles. Together with these sounds, Diana heard her husband’s voice, which for some reason had again become deep and slow.
“And now,” he said, “the question that arises is to understand why the Albanians have created all that.”
He talked on, his head quite close to her shoulder, as if he meant to ask her for answers to all the questions or speculations that he advanced, though his delivery scarcely allowed for any responses on her part. He went on to ask (it was not clear if the questions were addressed to himself, or Diana, or someone else), why the Albanians had created the institution of the guest, exalting it above all other human relations, even those of kinship.
“Perhaps the answer lies in the democratic character of this institution,” he said, setting himself to think his way through the matter. “Any ordinary man, on any day, can be raised to the lofty station of a guest. The path to that temporary deification is open to anybody at any time. Isn’t that so, Diana?”
“Yes,” she said softly, without taking her hand from her forehead.
He shifted in his seat, as if looking both for a more comfortable position and for the most appropriate language in which to express his idea.
“Given that anyone at all can grasp the sceptre of the guest,” he went on, “and since that sceptre, for every Albanian, surpasses even the king’s sceptre, may we not assume that in the Albanian’s life of danger and want, that to be a guest if only for four hours or twenty-four hours, is a kind of respite, a moment of oblivion, a truce, a reprieve, and—why not?—an escape from everyday life into some divine reality?”
He fell silent, as if waiting for a reply, and Diana, feeling that she had to say something to him, found it easier to lay her head on his shoulder again.
Bessian found that the familiar odor of his wife’s hair rather disturbed the stream of his thoughts. Just as the greening of nature gives us the feeling of spring, or snow the feeling of winter, her chestnut hair tumbling over his shoulder aroused in him better than anything else the sensation of happiness. The thought that he was a happy man began to shine feebly in his consciousness, and in the velvet jewel-case of the carriage, that idea took on the secret languor of luxurious things.
“Are you tired?” he asked.
“Yes, a bit.”
He slipped his arm around her shoulders and drew her gently to him, breathing in the perfume of his young wife’s body, given off subtly, like every valued thing.
“We’ll be there soon.”
Without removing his arm, he lowered his head slightly towards the window so as to glance outside.
“In an hour, an hour and a half at most, we’ll be there,” he said.
Through the glass, one could see in the distance, standing out clearly, the jagged outlines of the mountains in that March afternoon flooded with rain.
“What district are we in?”
He looked outside but did not answer her, merely shrugging his shoulders to indicate that he did not know. She remembered the days before their departure (days that now seemed to have been torn away not from this month of March, but from another March, as far off as the stars), filled with witty sayings, with laughter, with jokes, fears, jealousies, all stemming from their “northern adventure” as Adrian Guma had dubbed it when they had met him at the post office where they were composing a telegram to send to someone who lived on the High Plateau. He had said, That’s like sending a message to the birds or to the thunderbolts. Then the three had laughed, and in all the merriment, Adrian had gone on asking, “You really have an address up there? Forgive me, I just can’t believe it.”
“A little while longer and we’ll be there,” Bessian said for the third time, leaning towards the window. Diana wondered how he could know that they were approaching their destination, travelling on a road without signposts or milestones. As for Bessian, he was thinking that he did not have time to say more about the cult of hospitality, just as evening was drawing on, and they were drawing nearer and nearer to the tower in which they would spend the night.
“In a little while, this evening, we shall assume the crown of the guest,” he murmured, only just touching her cheek with his lips. She moved her head towards him, her breath came faster as in their most intimate moments, but it ended in a sigh.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she said quietly. “I’m just a little frightened.”
“Really?” he said, laughing. “But how can that be?”
“I don’t know.”
He shook his head for a moment, as if her half-smile, close to his face, were the flicker of a match that he must try to blow out.
“Well, Diana, let me tell you that it doesn’t matter at all that we are in death’s kingdom—you can be sure that you have never been so well shielded from danger or the least affront. No royal pair has ever had more devoted guards ready to sacrifice their present and their future than we shall have tonight. Doesn’t that give you a sense of security?”
“That’s not what I was thinking about,” Diana said, changing her position on the seat. “I’m troubled by something else, and I don’t really know how to explain it. A little while ago you talked about divinity, destiny, fatality. They are all very fine things, but they are frightening, too. I don’t want to bring misfortune to anyone.”
“Oh,” he said gaily, “like every sovereign, you find the crown both alluring and frightening. That’s quite understandable, since, after all, if every crown is glorious, every crown is woeful, too.”
“That’s enough, Bessian,” she said quietly. “Don’t make fun of me.”
“I’m not making fun of you,” he said with the same playful air. “I have the very same feeling. The guest, the bessa, and vengeance are like the machinery of classical tragedy, and once you are caught up in the mechanism, you must face the possibility of tragedy. But despite all that, Diana, we have nothing to fear. In the morning, we’ll take off our crowns and be relieved of their weight until the night.”
He felt her fingers stroking his neck, and he pressed his head against her hair. How shall we sleep there, she wondered, together or apart? And now she asked him aloud, “Is it still very far?”
Bessian opened the carriage door a little to put the question to the coachman, whose existence he had nearly forgotten. The man’s reply was accompanied by a blast of cold air.
“We’re nearby,” he said.
“Brr, it’s cold,” Diana sa
id.
Outside, the afternoon that until then had seemed never-ending, showed the first signs of fading. The panting of the horses now became louder, and Diana imagined the froth of foam at their mouths as they drew the carriage towards the unknown kulla where Bessian and herself were to stay the night.
Dusk had not quite fallen when the carriage halted. The couple got down. After the long clop-clapping of hooves, the protracted jolting, the world seemed mute and frozen. The coachman pointed to one of the towers that rose up a good distance away beside the road, but Bessian and Diana, whose legs were quite stiff, wondered how they would manage to reach it.
For a while they prowled about the coach, climbing in again to take their travelling bags and suitcases, and they set out at last towards the tower—an odd procession, the couple, arm in arm, leading the way, followed by the coachman who was carrying their suitcases.
When they drew near the tower, Bessian let go his wife’s arm, and with steps that she thought not very confident, went right up to the stone building. The narrow door was closed, and there was no sign of life at the loopholes, and in a flash a question came to him: Had they received their telegram?
Now Bessian halted before the kulla, and he looked up to call out, according to custom, “O, master of the house, are you receiving guests?” In other circumstances, Diana would have burst out laughing to see her husband playing the part of a visiting mountaineer, but now something restrained her. Perhaps it was the shadow of the tower (stone casts a heavy shadow, the old men said) that was putting a weight on her heart.
Bessian raised his head a second time, and to Diana who was looking at him, he seemed small and defenseless at the foot of that cold, thousand-year-old wall to which he was about to call out.
Midnight had long passed, but Diana, who was alternately too cold and too hot under two heavy woollen blankets, had not managed to go to sleep. They had arranged a bed for her on the second storey, right on the floor with the women and girls of the household. Bessian had been installed on the storey above, in the guest chamber. He too, she thought, could not possibly have fallen asleep.